I have no problems redoing all the website layouts or any of that and frankly i would expect that with new layout tools i would have to draw up new layouts. That's a bit annoying but that's honestly expected.
But I can't copy over sales and analytics data. Losing that 8 years of history makes the switch to 7.1 the exact same level of difficulty as switching to a completely different competitive platform instead.
As for why i want to upgrade, I keep adding products and frankly the 7.0 templates are overflowing a bit to the point where customers are having issues narrowing it down to what they want, especially on mobile. The 7.1 layout allows for categories to be used much more efficiently. I can't even reorder categories in 7.0 which seems like pretty basic functionality. They recognize this because they added the feature in 7.1 but apparently it's ok to leave old customers in the dark.